26 Things About Me

F — Favorite Color. I don't think you have to do much looking to see that it's blue. I adore the color blue. So much so that I literally put it on everything that I can. My car, which I call Ash, is blue; many of my clothes are blue; my accessories tend towards blue; and my online name in many spaces is "bluejack404."

Why the 404? That's a story for another time.

I like earth tones and dark colors, but I tend to stick with blue as my primary color for just about everything. So, for example, my car is blue with black upholstery and gray/silver accessories. I like how the darker colors make the blue pop.

I like purple too, but mostly as a complement to blue (as evidenced by this website).

G — Girlie girl? This is where I first realized that Erin didn't publish her list verbatim. Erin attributed her list to "a grumpy old dude" who calls himself Archon. In his, he asked himself whether ghosts were real. So I'll ask myself that same question as soon as I answer whether I'm a "girlie girl."

No. I'm not a girlie girl. But I do occasionally squeal when things happen that I'm excited about. Is that what girlie girls do? I don't even know. I kind of hate the entire idea of calling girlie girls that. I feel like it implies that girls who aren't "girlie" are less girls. No. All girls are girls, all women are women. Femininity isn't a damn black-and-white concept.

There's been a lot of ado done about the differences between men and women, culminating in the publication of that atrocity called Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which I refuse to link to. Research has indicated that there are differences between areas of male and female brains that has caused people to conclude that looking at an individual's brain could allow one to discern whether that individual is a man or a women. Worse, a lot of people seem to believe very strongly that there are such things as male and female brains.

This is patently false. An analysis of the MRI scans of over 1,400 human brains, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on November 30, 2015, reveals that there is no dimorphism in the human brain. To put it another way, there are no distinct male/female differences in the human brain. Only about 0-8% of people had traits belonging predominantly to one sex or the other. Meanwhile 23-53% of people had brains with traits that were "mixed," that is, having traits that were more commonly found in one sex over the other. To borrow a quote from Dr. Steven Novella, "This does not mean that males and females are the same, or that there are no differences. It does mean that individuals are individuals. People are not mentally defined by their sex."

So screw the term "girlie girl." Unless you're a minor, a female, and part of the fraction of that 0-8% of people with brains that match their sex exclusively, you probably aren't a "girlie girl" either. That's actually pretty awesome. As the lead author of the study, Dr. Daphne Joel, puts it...

We show there are differences, but brains do not come in male and female forms. The differences you see are differences between averages. Each one of us is a unique mosaic.

Seriously, though. Occam's razor comes into play here. We understand a whole heck of a lot about the physical world. To believe that ghosts are real is to accept that our entire concept of physics at the macro-level is flawed. That's an absurd position for any scientific layman to hold.

Consider a fictional piece about ghosts. Now imagine you're writing science-fiction and not horror. I'm literally asking you to explain ghosts to me, scientifically. Try to do it without creating more problems than you solve. That's precisely the problem that scientists have when some of them try to develop hypotheses to prove the existence of ghosts.

I could go deeper, but I think this interlude is quickly becoming a research paper. Let's see what awesome things H holds for us.

H — Hometown. Hialeah, Florida! I was born at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida, on July 11, 1983, at about 7:47 pm. I was premature, so I spent a few extra days at the hospital before my mom brought me to live in a pink apartment building, apartment 304, right next to the Palmetto Expressway. I have so many memories of that place. The last time I visited that building was well over five years ago, and that was me sneaking in with an ex-girlfriend to go be nostalgic. I took some pictures, but I can't find them.

I — In Love with... Life, my friends and family, my career (both writing and counseling), and pretty much everything. I have a lot of love to give, I think. Every once in a while, I wish that I felt less intensely about things. Then I remember that the passion that I have is what a lot of people seem to think is one of my greatest qualities. So I've opted to keep the feelings, painful though they might be at times.

J — Jealous of... Not really anyone.

Okay, that's a lie. I have envy, but I find that envy is only useful insofar as it's a catalyst to make one improve oneself. Jealousy feels like more of an inert word. A static self-loathing directed outwards, often against loved ones. I try not to indulge it.